Unveiling Organizational Behavior: Skills, Roles, and Challenges

1. Chapter 1 What is Organizational Behavior?

2. Learning Objectives Demonstrate the importance of interpersonal skills in the workplace. Describe the manager’s functions, roles, and skills. Define organizational behavior (OB). Show the value to OB of systematic study. Identify the major behavioral science disciplines that contribute to OB. Demonstrate why there are few absolutes in OB. Identify the challenges and opportunities managers have in applying OB concepts. Compare the three levels of analysis in this book’s OB model.

3. The Importance of Interpersonal Skills What is interpersonal skills? Why it is needed? It is very important but not enough … why?

4. What Managers Do? Manager They get things done through other people Organization A consciously coordinated social unit composed of two or more people that functions on a relatively continuous basis to achieve a common goal or set of goals. Management Functions Planning Organizing Leading Controlling

5. What Managers Do? Management Roles Interpersonal Roles Figurehead Leader Liason Informational Roles Monitor Disseminator Spokesperson Decisional Roles Entrepreneur Disturbance Handler Resource Allocator Negotiator

6. What Managers Do? Management Skills Technical Skills The ability to apply specialized knowledge or expertise Human Skills The ability to work with, understand, and motivate other people, both individually and in groups Conceptual Skills The mental ability to analyze and diagnose complex situations

7. What Managers Do? Effective Versus Successful Managerial Activities

8. Enter Organizational Behavior A field of study that investigates the impact that individuals, groups, and structure have on behavior within organizations, for the purpose of applying such knowledge toward improving an organization’s effectiveness

9. Complementing Intuition with Systematic Study Systematic Study Looking at relationships, attempting to attribute causes and effects, and drawing conclusions based on scientific evidence Evidence Based Management Basing managerial decisions on the best available scientific evidence Intuition A gut feeling not necessarily supported by research

10. Disciplines that Contribute to the OB Field Psychology The science that seeks to measure, explain, and sometimes change the behavior of humans and other animals Social Psychology An area within psychology that blends concepts from psychology and sociology and that focuses on the influence of people on one another Sociology The study of people in relation to their social environment or culture Anthropology The study of societies to learn about human beings and their activities

11. Disciplines that Contribute to the OB Field

12. There are Few Absolutes in OB Why there are few absolutes in OB? Because of situational factors that make the main relationship between two variables change … e.g., the relationship may hold for one condition but not another Contingency Variables Situational Factors Variable that moderate the relationship between two or more other variables

13. There are Few Absolutes in OB Independent Variable (X) “Cause” Dependent Variable (Y) “Effect” Contingency Variables (z) Situational Factors

14. Challenges and Opportunities for OB 1 Responding to Economic Pressure 2 Responding to Globalization 3 Managing Workforce Diversity 4 Improving Customer Service 5 Improving People Skills 6 Stimulating Innovation and Change 7 Coping with “Temporariness” 8 Working in Networked Organizations 9 Helping Employees Balance Work-Life Conflicts 10 Creating a Positive Work Environment 11 Improving Ethical Behavior

15. Coming Attractions: Developing an OB Model A model Abstraction of reality, or a simplified representation of some real-world phenomenon

16. Coming Attractions: Developing an OB Model Input Process Outcomes

17. Coming Attractions: Developing an OB Model The Plan of the Book

18. Coming Attractions: Developing an OB Model The Independent Variables (X) The Dependent Variables (Y) • The presumed cause of the change in the dependent variable (Y) • This is the variable that OB researchers manipulate to observe the changes in Y • This is the response to X (the independent variable) • It is what the OB researchers want to predict or explain • The interesting variable! X → Y → Predictive Ability

19. Coming Attractions: Developing an OB Model The Dependent Variables The Independent Variables Productivity Individual – Level Variables Absenteeism Turnover Group – Level Variables Deviant Workplace Behavior Organizational Citizenship Behavior Organization System – Level Variables Job Satisfaction

20. Coming Attractions: Developing an OB ModelToward A contingency OB Model Dependent Variables (Y) Three Levels Independent Variables (X)